My third animation remake, Music of Erich Zann, was my first full-scale attempt to make a short animation. I had made "Dust Bunnies" a few years before, but this was more complicated with human characters and several sets. The first version took me 5 years to make. I had to learn basic modelling, rigging, lighting... the whole works. It was done in Cinema 4D and the opening POV shot walking up the street took 25 hours to render.
Like the previous 2 remakes, I like the original version, but it lacks, mostly because of the skill and technical deficits I had at the time, the look and feel I wanted to achieve. My goal is to have online the best versions of my films on display and use the remakes to get better with Blender and animation in general for future projects now that I am retired and have (in theory) more time to work on personal projects.
Old version of the street. Not the reason this needed to be redone, I was satisfied with the look.
Old and new version of Zann. New is more realistic and will have more emotional range. Same with the narrator.
I was happy enough with my first image but since I finished it I have tried to reopen the file and becuase. I changed computers and Blender versions it was missing textures and I decided to fix that. In the time between finishing it and seeing the problem I also learned a lot more and thought this could be very much improved and I think I had been . he skeleton is much more real looking and I used cycles to render it, which is much more accurate the EEVEE. Above is the new and below is the old so you cna see the difference. It took 90 minutes to render. I could have optimized it more but it is also poster sizedin case I decide to print it.
Another in this maybe series. Made in Blender this one I had a very strong idea for based on an engraving my friend Jeannette showed me decades ago. Well, sort of... it turns out the engraving "Death as a friend." Looks nothing like this and then I thought it might be from another old illustration, "Death as a friend to the poor" which was a little closer to what was in my head. Could be I saw something and just associated it with a title I like better.
In any case, this is an old woman holding hands with death in a lonely room that doesn't look like it's had many visitors recently. I tried two versions: colour and black and white. They both have strengths and weaknesses. Did post-processing in Sffinity Studio and discovered that the NIK plugins now work in them, as they did in the older Affinity suite!
I have had an idea of doing something like this since the '8-s and have never found a way to get what I wanted. I t was going to be a photo then an ink drawing and then back and forth between those until recently I decided learning more Blender was a way to get an image out of my head. Of course now I might do a small series.
I have a good amount of resources with Blender now to accomplish something close to what's in my head. I thought I would learn some techniques like depth passes and isolating parts of a scene with other passes but as I worked on this, none of those things would have been useful.
The large cryptlike building behind the figures is based fairly closely on a structure in a huge cemetery in Budapest. The mourning figure is based on a mourning angel statue, I really liked the pose. The skeleton already had wings so he didn't get any.
I had some buggy issues with Blender that were pretty annoying. I use a Make Human plugin integrated into Blender and Humgen to make more realistic humans but Make Human was missing some features somehow and Humgen wasn't working for the cross-legged pose. I settled on Make Human and it worked out but I need to figure out what went wrong. The skeleton and wings were models from my C4D days. I did post processing in Affinity Studio.
This project was suggested to me at a showing of one of my earlier animations. I did not think I could pull it off, the story has over 1000 people and a setting involving 7 rooms of various colours among other technically challenging aspects. After reading the story a few times more I decided it could be pulled back with less people and less room and still keep the tone and message of the story intact.
Even so, it would mean animating more characters in several shots than I ever had before and involve some animal simulations I wasn’t sure how to pull off. Poe’s wordiness and descriptions were also pulled back partly to reflect the simpler setting but mostly to reflect how bad a narrator I am. I did enhance my voice a little to make it sound better.
I used Make Human and Human Gen to create the characters. This made it feasible to make so many and also Human Gen can add clothes you make or buy in an easy way which I really needed for this project. One thing that Blender has in abundance is reasonably priced fantastic addons so my one man show looks better, I hope, than it would have totally on my own.
It was rendered in EEVEE and compositing and colour work was done in Apple Motion while editing was done in Final Cut Pro.
I did have issues with Human Gen here and there. A few characters suddenly had finger rigging issues and I wish that plugin had more secondary facial controls like Make Human. It has much better skin and hair so it’s a question of which I could get the most out of. The robed figure was simply rigged withAuto Rig pro. Something I plan to use more in future.
Not what is next except to get familiar with compositing in Blender. I would like to use depth maps and maybe motion maps in Apple Motion like I used to and separate elements for better colour corrections. I will try and redo some older animations I think will be greatly improved over the Cinema 4D versions and decide on a new project as I go go through all of that.
This was a bear to do, The coat is not from the plugin I used to make the characters I spent 30 hours trying to attach it so it would animate with the figure. In the end... there is a way to do in the plugin itself which takes 1 minute. God damn it! At least I know about this feature and use it in future. It needed mnor tweaks after it was done but that is often the case.
The robed figure. Already rigged for movement, though the eyes will need better control. I haven't gone much further with this lately. I haven't had the energy to figure out what needs to come next.
I have started preproduction for "Masque of the Red Death" based on the story by Edgar Allen Poe. This has some new challenges for me such as there needs to be many more characters in some shots than usual. I keep it to three as a rule to not overtax my computer but since switching to Blender and having my MAC in 10 processor i9 with a good graphics card I feel I can push farther. For the crowd scenes I might use 2D characters for the background and have several 3D ones who can have more movement. I was hoping I could find some free or cheap medieval costumes but not much much so far. I will have to wing it.
This image is the opening shot after the title sequence and when the narration will begin. It took a few weeks to design and put together despite using some great plugins to lessen the work load. HunGen for the bodies, Fire_fx for the bonfire, Auto building for the houses and castle, Alt tab easy fog 2 for the atmosphere, and Fauna sketcher to ad crows in the sky and flies (not visible in this shot, for the bodies. The fog rolls forward and the trees have a slight breeze blowing them. Depending on how the narration works out this could be several shots or one longer tracking shot. This is straight from Blender so there will be some colour grading etc in post eventually.
One big challenge, other than my dumb debutant Blender mistakes, was placing the flickering light for the bonfire. making was easy enough but when I placed it in the bonfire it wasn't visible and the render time went up 4 times! I am using Eeevee to render as I did with my first Blender short "the Hound" as its pretty good now and getting better but also fast. This shot takes 30 seconds to render (with the light issue 20 minutes!)
Next step is the model the interior castle rooms where the story takes place. it's 7 rooms, identical save the last one but in different colours. I will need to learn to making some blood effects for this one and continue to work on getting better performances from my characters. Hopefully I can get together with the voice actor for the narration sooner than later as not having it slows down production.
This was a suggestion from some people and I assumed the story was beyond my skills for years but I think I might succeed now and upon writing the script I realized it was not as long as I thought and got some good ideas on how to economize the plot to fit a short animated film.
I decided to remake my old space station project in Blender. I haven't tried animation yet I have to learn how to rotate the disks. Some day I will. Below are two older version done in Cinema 4D which I was very happy with at the time but not so much now. The oldest version is really not good, no sense of scale, the details are too large. Below it is much better but the new one above has a tone more detail and I was able to make very quickly. I like the 3D earth better in C4D that was free plugin that looked amazing, the Blender earth I used has texture issues at the poles. There is a Blender add-on for making a few planets in the solar system that includes some NASA hardware like the actual space station but I will need to budget for it. It is not expensive I am just too poor right now.
Further along. The interior structure I thought would be a breeze. I would simply use the manor model and delete everything I didn't need. Turned out to be a nightmare and I wasted a couple days. Instead I made a trace of the floor plan in an EPS file and converted it to a mesh and just extruded upwards to make the walls. Lesson learned.
I am now adding the furniture and textures. There will a lot of books and weird paraphernalia like full animal and human bones on display. The characters live in a secluded manor so no one gets wind of their "collection".
The animation will be in black and white but I thought the colour rendering might be interesting to show as well.
I based this crypt on one I LOVE from the North Dorchester burying ground in Boston. I had to learn sweep nurbs in blender which involves making a profile and "sweeping" it along another shape, in this case a rectangle then adding details on top. I used a plugin that damaged things and another to add a grunge texture to complete the worn/aging effect. This will be the main focus in a couple important shots so it has a lot more detail than anything else in the cemetery will have.
Getting there. The textures are greatly improved and the rendering time is still reasonable for animation. So far. I have to make the garden area on the side of the house for a scene later in the film and find a better solution for the walkway to the house and the ground around the house that you can't see in this render. Balancing the street light and fog was not easy, it had to be think enough for something emerge from it and not too think to hide the lights completely.
I certainly hope I am! With the release of 4.0 Blender has updated it's interface to a point I thought I could finally understand it and use it. I had no real choice, my V19 of Cinema 4D stopped being supported by the MAC OS and Maxon has gone the subscription route, including not very satisfying updates since.
I started with CG Cookie's playlist of basics which introduces you to the layout, interface and basic concepts in a sort of an entertaining but text book way. I will go over it again as I begin to start a real short animation in my Lovecraft series... soon... soon-ish.
I then went on to Blender Guru's famous Blender donut tutorial, updated for 4.0 and teaches the software by taking you through a project using all of Blender's most used features and tools. I didn't follow it slavishly, I have a lot of 3D experience already but it really helped to see it all done step by step in Blender. So I have joined the crowd and finished the donut tutorial.
I do feel I can work or will be able to work in Bender now, gradually getting confidence and learning the things I need to to continue making films. The interface is more user friendly but not exactly intuitive or easy yet. It also crashed much more than C4D did for me. More positively working with the EEVEE live renderer it was much easier to see what I was working on clearly and with a big update for that coming very soon, I can see rendering my finished project quickly. Cycles was more slow but also, I thought, a better render than that of the native C4D rendering options.
So see my donut thing in all it's donut-y glory above.
As mentioned before, the 2001 models I had found were lacking in some ways. Some had issues with the texture maps which was where most the of the details were and other just lacked details. While I am still not trying to be super faithful to every details, it did bother me that a couple of the images were just too simple and slapping on a bump map did not really get the images t where I wanted them. So I kept some elements and made over from scratch others. On the Discovery it was mostly changing the textures and making the main control sphere and the reactor and engines myself. With he Moonbus, it was a matter of adding a ton of details that were lacking. I watched the film again and it then could not just let my fun project stay as it was.
The top image you can see I added a ton to the rear of the sip, there was almost nothing there before which was why I opted to show only the front. For the front - here is a before and after, I think it's improved. It could probably still use some details from inside the cockpit but I think the blue light is better than the yellow.
The Moonbus had many more details than I remembered and so I added a lot more into the existing model. Not sure anyone would notice but me but since these were for me, that was enough to get motivated to do the extra work.
As the price of Cinema 4D has jumped astronomically over the years with less and less improvements and new features to pay for that extra cost, it has become apparent that unless I get a hell of lot more work that pays a hell of a lot more money, eventually my current version will run out of steam and be unusable. Already, I am trying to adapt to the untimely death of Cactus Dan whose plugins are essential to rigging in C4D (In my opinion) and are no longer being updated.
To start finding alternatives, I decided to learn Blender, a free program that has been used for some amazing animations and has ALL the features and more of C4D and frankly just about any other software out there. Of course being free software it has its pluses and minuses , a big minus being not many places use it professionally.
Just Starting to Learn
Blender is a very deep program to learn. I decided to start very simply as I had tried to learn it unsuccessfully in the past. Despite having used a number of software over the last few decades, I couldn’t even place a cube into the scene or render anything. It was frustrating and I have to say, it still is. The interface is pretty terrible from an end user’s point of view. Like much of the freeware out there made by programmers, it is set up more to a programmer’s set of needs. Blender requires that you learn a huge amount of keyboard shortcuts in conjunction with a 3 button mouse just to navigate in it’s windows. Many of the shortcuts are non standard so it can be like learning a new language just to do the most basic of tasks. It’s a well known issue in the Blender community and there is an ongoing debate from what I read on various forums on what to do, if anything, about that problem. It IS a problem, despite the alleged benefits of typing in values by hand for some people, it simply isn’t how we work these days and limits drastically the reach of this fairly amazing effort. Many of the arguments for keeping as it is are reminiscent of those when computer went from DOS commands to a graphic interface and I would argue that argument was lost a long time ago.
To get over this hurdle, I bought a 600 page book The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics (3rd addition) by John M. Blain. I don’t find the writing style so easy to understand but it covers seemingly everything and should be a great reference source as I go on. Another thing I did was follow tutorials, a few about the basic interface which were somewhat helpful and a few at www.LittleWebHut.com which I am using as my work samples here because of the simplicity of the projects and the instructor never assumes you will remember the complex series of shortcuts and goes over each progression step by step which helps me to slowly memorize and adapt to the interface while creating something interesting. I picked two basic modelling projects, an animation that involved particles the node based cycles render engine and one that creates a robot dog and introduced me to the key frame and timeline system in Blender.
My Impressions So far
Having only scratched the surface, many of my opinions will surely change over time. I plan to keep at this another 3 months intensely, hopefully ending in doing a complete short animation in Blender from start to finish.
The modelling tools are interesting and while not intuitive, cover all the bases and have some interesting ideas behind them. You have to accept each change before moving on to to the next - this is pretty annoying and slow. The bones IK/FK system is clunky and something like setting up an IK chain (so far, there are certainly plenty of functions I have not been exposed to yet) is manually accomplished bone by bone while it’s a simple click in C4D and other programs. The particle system is pretty good from what I’ve experienced. Not as good as X-particles (which is an unfair comparison) but I found using them fairly easy. Rendering is a little complicated. The Blender engine is only barely serviceable and might be good as a test render while the Cycles engine is nodes based and manages to give flicker free animations using techniques that take longer and are not as usefully implemented as they could be. You have a lot less control in Blender in the final render from what I see and a lot more control in setting up the textures. The key framing is not great sorry to say. It’s hard to get a handle on and I found myself swearing quite a bit just moving a sphere from on spot to another.
Things I need to Learn for this to be Practical
Compositing is a large part of my work flow, not just 3D into live action video but often separating things like motion blur and depth of field to be adjusted in another program like After Effects or Motion to gain better control and save on rendering time. The capacity is here, I just have to learn how and if I can save different layers (like a shadow, z depth, motion vector or object layer) as separate files on export. Mograph-like clones and animation are the bread and butter of many 3D artists and Blender is lacking in this department but they update with new features regularly so who knows how long it will stay behind in this aspect. Blender has some pretty awesome character rigging tools, if you can learn to use them. I think I will gain some very much needed experience in more advanced rigging techniques as I go along.
Blenders Biggest Advantages
Being free is one, but not the most important as functionality and ease of use trumps free while doing serious work. Time is money and also the less aggravating something is to use, the more you will use it. Blender’s add-ons are nothing short of amazing and super useful. They provide easier and faster ways to do things you would pay tons of cash for on another platform and many are freely included. Some examples are an auto-rigger, a room builder and even a very adaptive character builder, something all high end 3D software should have as making characters is the biggest time killer and often the most discouraging aspect of 3D work fro many animators. I wish there was a clothing generator as well! Those working on this software update it quite often and it’s always improving. They seem very transparent and open to suggestions - something Maxon (C4D) has most definitely not been in recent years. While far to many features are hidden and hard to find, they are there and I was surprised to discover many features I paid for in C4D plugins were just sitting below the surface in Blender. It should be stated that overall, it is fairly stable and doesn’t crash often, but it does crash. It can be a little buggy as well. So like all complicated software, save often!
Conclusion So Far
I can’t say I love Blender or that it will come my main software anytime soon. I can say it’s got the potential to become those things. I also find that learning it has already opened possibilities I had not thought of in C4D in terms of workflow and other things but can be applied to it. I can also see using some of the features in Blender as a way to get around or create things that C4D does not offer or do well and importing them.
Some projects I just use as tests, seeing how the render with a software or hardware upgrade or if they can be improved as I acquire new skills. This is one of those projects and I am pretty happy with it at the moment.
The station takes about 20 hours to render, far too long but it has a lot of details in case I ever want to do a close up shot. The earth has improved immensely since the first try at this and looks pretty real, I think, in this version.
I was asked to help out with some health videos for Moutons No More and Doctor Christopher labor at McGill University. The illustrations of people are for the most from the graphics department at McGill and the less than stellar ones are by me but we might be getting more help in that regard soon. I combined 3D and 2D motion graphics to try and get a fast moving animation based on the narration.
One thing I am not is a cartoonist, no matter how hard I try!
